[petsc-users] PETSc with modern C++

[Filippo Leonardi]

Hello,

I have a project in mind and seek feedback.

Disclaimer: I hope I am not abusing of this mailing list with this idea. If
so, please ignore.

As a thought experiment, and to have a bit of fun, I am currently
writing/thinking on writing, a small (modern) C++ wrapper around PETSc.

Premise: PETSc is awesome, I love it and use in many projects. Sometimes I
am just not super comfortable writing C. (I know my idea goes against
PETSc's design philosophy).

I know there are many around, and there is not really a need for this
(especially since PETSc has his own object-oriented style), but there are a
few things I would like to really include in this wrapper, that I found
nowhere):
- I am currently only thinking about the Vector/Matrix/KSP/DM part of the
Framework, there are many other cool things that PETSc does that I do not
have the brainpower to consider those as well.
- expression templates (in my opinion this is where C++ shines): this would
replace all code bloat that a user might need with cool/easy to read
expressions (this could increase the number of axpy-like routines);
- those expression templates should use SSE and AVX whenever available;
- expressions like x += alpha * y should fall back to BLAS axpy (tough
sometimes this is not even faster than a simple loop);
- all calls to PETSc should be less verbose, more C++-like:
  * for instance a VecGlobalToLocalBegin could return an empty object that
calls VecGlobalToLocalEnd when it is destroyed.
  * some cool idea to easily write GPU kernels.
- the idea would be to have safer routines (at compile time), by means of
RAII etc.

I aim for zero/near-zero/negligible overhead with full optimization, for
that I include benchmarks and extensive test units.

So my question is:
- anyone that would be interested (in the product/in developing)?
- anyone that has suggestions (maybe that what I have in mind is nonsense)?

If you have read up to here, thanks.
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